


Downstream

by karanguni



Category: The Bedlam Stacks - Natasha Pulley
Genre: M/M, Time Loop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-08
Updated: 2019-12-08
Packaged: 2021-02-26 01:48:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,663
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21715615
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/karanguni/pseuds/karanguni
Summary: Follow the river until the end of the of the beginning.
Relationships: Raphael/Merrick Tremayne
Comments: 10
Kudos: 59
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	Downstream

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lesyeuxverts](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lesyeuxverts/gifts).



Raphael stood with me at the edge of the floating city.

We were quiet; it was admittedly harder for us to talk now. After coffee, we'd worked out a system where he used a writing tablet made of slate and some chalk stuck on the end of what wa vs essentially a stone pencil, but it was slow going. It didn't bother me. Raphael's sense of humour hadn't changed: I'd nattered on about what I'd done with myself the last two decades, he'd replied with a succinct _Meanwhile, I had myself a good nap._

Still, we weren't quiet because it was hard to talk; we were quiet because the view was spectacular. Neither he nor I had ever explored the city before; I hadn't been allowed, he had been changing. Now the guards let us go wherever we wanted as long as I followed the rules, so we had come out to the very edge of where it felt safe to walk. We were so high up that the world below rolled itself out like a painted map of greens and blues and browns, covered here and there by the fog of war of low clouds. The city ended like the cliffs of Dover ended: no sloping gradient, just a sheer, vertical drop all the way down at land's end. The monks hadn't put up guard rails, operating on what I could only guess was the assumption that no one would be stupid enough to step out onto thin air.

I took one look over the edge and felt my whole body sway a little as if I'd been jerked forward by the navel. Raphael reached out and grabbed me, remembering only at the last moment not to close his hand around my arm, grabbing a stone fistful of my shirt instead. I heard one of the guards behind us bark a warning at me, as if it was my fault somehow that I had an overprotective markayuk at my back.

We were fine. It'd been just a passing moment of vertigo, and I felt fine right after. We were a good few feet back from the edge, Raphael refusing to let go of me, and for a minute nothing else happened.

So I really don't know what it was that made us fall. Maybe it was the altitude, or the vertigo again, or that inexorable pull of the thing the French call l'appel du vide. In any case, one moment Raphael was anchoring me down, then the next he seemed to be pitching me forward. I toppled over the edge. I shouted, but the rush of air stole away the sound. I thought I saw Raphael plummet past me. Idiotically, the only thing I could think of was how wrong that was – Newtonian mechanics meant we should have been falling at the same rate, except for differing air resistance... My mind blanked out after that. I fell, and kept falling for a long time.

* * *

Consciousness came to me slowly, like a tide ebbing in. My eyes felt like they were made of lead, and when I forced them open I found myself splayed out on the pebbled shallows of a river. The river stones beneath me were made of glass and threw prismatic rays of light in crazy directions. I wasn't sure how I was alive and relatively unbroken, but was not about to look a gift-horse in the mouth.

Something in my hindbrain, honed by years of expeditionary work as a Company man, screamed at me. Everything was bright, almost as bright as the monastery had been – too bright. The river water lapping at my ankles was cold, but the glassy riverbed was not; I felt warm, getting warmer. The sun was high overhead. This was all bad news; I remembered the boat catching fire near Bedlam.

I felt like I had been hit by a train, but I wasn't paralysed. I tried twitching my fingers and toes. When I managed that much, I bent my arms, then curled my knees up to my chest and found, to my immense relief, the whitewood band on my leg intact. I couldn't spend much longer curled up into a foetal position thanking God, so I forced myself up onto my hands and knees and scrambled up the slick glass shore onto the rocky scree of the land bank. I was abstractly aware of how detached I was feeling and knew that it was probably shock. I had to work through it.

I got into the shadow of the canyon walls, where I was at least safe from the sun. I propped my back up against the cliffside, panting like a rabid dog and trying hard not to hyperventilate. Now that I was out of immediate danger the fact that I had no idea where Raphael was was dawning on me. I had to push it out of my mind for a moment because I was sure I was going to have a full-blown panic if I didn't.

I forced myself to live in my body. It was a thing you had to be able to do when your boss sent you to places so stupidly dangerous that only other, equally stupid and presumably capable people went there.

I was miraculously uninjured. The river itself wasn't very wide and ran through a small canyon with walls that reared up high on both sides. I squinted downstream and saw the river winding like a glittering ribbon for a long way before it turned a bend and disappeared from view. The geography was unfamiliar. I could have been anywhere in Peru; I was only sure I was border from Bolivia because the alps rose to the southeast and I had a solid sense of where north was due to the position of the afternoon sun.

I shivered sitting still in the shade. My clothes were wet and plastered to me. My teeth were chattering, probably half from shock and half from the cold. With effort, I stripped and wandered out into the sun for long enough to lay my things out on a large boulder to dry. While naked, I risked hopping in and out of the light to stave off hypothermia. Within what I could only guess was a quarter of an hour, my clothes were dry enough to put on again, sun-seared and warm on my back. It made me feel enormously better.

 _Then_ I let myself panic.

'Raphael!' I shouted. My voice echoed madly down the canyon. 'Raphael! Where are you?'

Markayuk could survive a lot, but when they didn't _want_ to survive, they threw themselves off of cliffs. But Raphael had been fine, had been happy to see me again. But even if this had been an accident, even if he _had_ survived, it wasn't as though he could call back, could he? I was falling apart a bit and knew it. I put my face in my hands and let out a noise of anguish I would have been embarrassed to have anyone else hear. It took some of the edge off, enough for me to scramble upstream instead of just staring downriver like an idiot in distress, which I also was.

The river turned again not too far from where I'd fallen, and when I made the turn I saw shattered pieces of rock around the shallows on the opposite bank and nearly went to pieces myself.

I suddenly heard 'Merrick!' and my head snapped up from where I'd had my eyes fixed on that horrible vision of broken up pieces of markayuk. I saw Raphael on the other bank. 'Merrick!' he shouted again.

It was Raphael _himself_ in the sense that he looked exactly as I had known him to look, before. Human, or close enough. I didn't know what to say, so I didn't say anything. I waded out, flailing more than anything, and eventually lost contact with the riverbed and so ended up swimming, fighting the current, to get to the other side.

I felt Raphael grab me by my jacket collar as I got near. 'Are you an idiot or what?' he hissed at me, hauling us both backwards up the bank when I was in grabbing range. 'You could have drowned!'

I couldn't gather my thoughts, and only managed a sputtering, ' _You_ nearly gave me a heart attack, so who's the real idiot here?' in response.

We staggered up onto the bank and clutched at each other, my hands on his elbows and vice-versa as we stared at each other, wild-eyed.

'What happened?' I asked.

'I haven't got the faintest idea,' Raphael replied.

'You're not what you were,' I said. It was an obvious statement, but one of us had to say it.

'Oh, I didn't notice,' Raphael snapped back at me, but I could tell his sharpness came from relief, same as my stupidity. 'Nevermind that you just fell twenty thousand feet and landed without a scratch. Have you considered a career in the circus?'

I broke down laughing. Raphael joined me a moment later. We laughed until we wept, hugging each other in desperate relief, laughed until our throats ached and the worst of the hysteria passed.

'Get out of your wet things,' Raphael said to me when we were finally calm. He tugged on my coat sleeve. 'You'll get hypothermia and die.'

I didn't even bother to tell him that it was his fault I'd jumped into the river. Stripping naked in front of him should have felt uncomfortable, but it wasn't. I knew he didn't feel the cold the way I did, so I made him stand in as a clothesline and hung my shirt and jacket and pants and everything else on his arms.

'They'll dry faster this way,' I insisted as I hopped in and out of the light for the second time today. 'Do you have any idea where we are?'

Raphael shook his head. 'Not in the foggiest. I'm not sure how we're even alive. How I'm...' He trailed off.

'It doesn't make sense,' I agreed. 'Even if we had crashed down somewhere with deeper water, at the speed we must have been falling the _both_ of us should have shattered into a thousand pieces. _You_ coming out unscathed from a shattered stone shell I can almost accept, but _I_ should be dead.'

'Markayuk aren't people trapped in stone, they _are_ stone,' Raphael said, in that funny way of his of always excluding himself from their number. 'I should be as dead as you.'

'So you didn't push me?'

Raphael stared at me. He threw my things onto the bank and then I could see he was angry. 'Merrick, why the _fuck_ would I have pushed you? That would have been one hell of a way of expressing my gratitude for you coming back. Of course I didn't fucking _push_ you!'

'Sometimes markayuk go crazy when their change isn't right, and yours hadn't been exactly easy going–'

'Do I _sound_ insane to you?'

' _I_ sound insane to me,' I said, walking over and putting my hands on his shoulders. There was no one to stop me here. I hugged him. 'I know you're not,' I whispered fiercely into his ear. 'I'm sorry.'

Raphael was stiff for a moment more, then he relaxed. He tentatively reached around me and we stayed locked together for a bit before we both pulled away. We looked at one another, aware that we were no closer to understanding what had happened. I shivered even though I was crisping under the sun. He looked uncomfortable, and it wasn't because I was standing there naked next to him.

I rubbed my hands over my arms, nervous. 'If we _are_ dead, then this really doesn't look like what I thought Purgatory would look like.'

'And what is Purgatory supposed to look like?'

'I don't know, you're the priest, you tell me. I haven't cracked open a Bible in years. I always thought if Purgatory _did_ exist it would be something like a otherworldly library, one where you were forced to read all the books you borrowed without finishing in your lifetime before you could leave.' I wasn't being helpful, but it was strangely carthatic to indulge in ridiculousness. I was normally fairly composed when in dire straits; this felt so far past dire that things just seemed absurd.

It made Raphael snort, which was also worth it. He reached down and picked up my shirt from it'd ended up. 'Your clothes are dry,' he said, handing my things back to me.

I put them on, and felt more inclined to act sober. 'I'm not a philosopher, natural or otherwise,' I said, doing up my sleeves. 'I don't know what happened, and under the circumstances I'm inclined to focus on what we _can_ do, which would be to get out of here. Since I _feel_ alive, and I'd like to keep feeling that way.'

Raphael nodded, and helped me into my coat. 'We should follow the river,' he said. 'Most communities are built up around it, and it's impossible to get lost that way.'

'All right,' I said, finding that as logical a course of action as any. 'How do you feel, by the way? Now that I'm done being histrionic.'

Raphael extended one hand out and stretched his fingers, then closed them into a fist. 'Good,' he admitted. 'All things considered. I don't feel so foggy anymore. It's as though I really did have a long nap – a good one. I don't feel an episode coming on, at least, I feel sure about that.'

'That's good,' I said. 'You were a mess, before.'

He grunted wordless agreement. 'Do you have anything on you that might be worth something?' he asked. He touched his leather vest and the _khipu_ string around his wrist. 'The monks don't didn't dress me for adventure.'

I lifted my own hand, where his rosary was still wrapped, and then patted my pockets. 'I've got my pocket knife,' I said, pulling it out. 'I always carry it when I'm travelling. That's good. Here's my compass.' But when I opened it, it had been smashed by the fall and the needle was missing. 'And my pocket watch.' I held it up to my ear and could hear it ticking. 'Still working, but whether it's in good order or not I don't know.'

Raphael grimaced but didn't comment. There was nothing else to be had from staying, so we started following the river.

* * *

We had a lot of time to talk as we trudged along the riverbank. It was a straightforward march; as long as we were careful to stay out of the sun and not trip on anything, we could amble along at a good clip without having to worry about navigation. Without the pressure of Martel's men on us or my smuggling quinine or Raphael undergoing a change, hiking along was pleasant. Raphael led, since the glare from the light off the river bothered him less, and I could keep my eyes down to spare myself sunblindness.

'This isn't quite a ramble,' I said at some point, 'but for a given value this is pretty close to being in the countryside, in Peru.'

Raphael huffed a laugh. 'You're horrible at idle talk.'

'I'm not usually very good at being around people,' I conceded.

'Didn't you learn? You can't have been alone all twenty years.' There was something about his tone of voice when he said it that I realised was possibly worry.

'Mina kept me company when I was in England, but she has Cecila and all the social life she could want being Clem's widow,' I said. 'Usually when I was home I just spent the time at Kew working or being Sing's houseguest. I couldn't keep a wife if I tried; I've been told I'm work obsessed when I'm not in Peru.'

The truth was that it had been easier to pass the time keeping busy than being social. Mina worried about me, but she knew that I was strange enough to _like_ being Sing's dog. The last two decades of doing work for him had been kinder to me by far than the handful of idle years spent in the reciprocal torment of Charles' company at Heligan. It was hard to be melancholic when you were too busy building up the grimy foundations of the British Empire to pay attention to anything.

'Still smuggling?' Raphael asked, looking back at me out of the corner of one eye.

'Not always,' I admitted. 'Sometimes it was just being a good trader, a good merchant. I was in Japan for a long while, working with a good friend. Keita – maybe you'll meet him one day. He was with me in Hong Kong when we got blown up and I injured my leg.' I realised I couldn't quite remember if I'd told Raphael that story before: it really had been a long time, and I was only human. 'Japan opened up a little, or maybe it's better to say that some countries pried it open. He's from there, so it was actually us doing diplomacy for a change. Whenever we got bored waiting for things to hurry up, he'd beat Japanese into me or drag me off to look at interesting bits of botany. They have everything from very small containerised trees to very large bamboo groves. He seemed to know that I needed distracting.'

'Containerised trees?'

'It's a bit like a botanist trying to keep a pet mountain. It's glacial work – they have masters who go out into the woods and bring back established specimen trees, which they then grow in very small pots. It takes a lot of work and skill to do that without just killing the tree. They have specific aesthetic styles that the tree is pruned – they call it trained – into. Some of the examples I saw were hundreds of years old. They'd make a good houseplant for you, except I expect you'd kill it and they're worth a lot.'

'You're out of your mind, Tremayne,' Raphael informed me.

'I am, aren't I?'

'Was it Japan the whole time?'

'No. Brazil, too, for rubber. That was more of my old job.' Meaning smuggling, lying, any-means-necessarying work: the kind of thing that Company men sleeping on English mattresses wake up one morning missing. It was why the Company had never paid well: it expected its expeditionaries to all be bastards addicted to the thrill – if employees wanted the money, they should be able to grab it themselves. The Company gave you all the opportunity in the world – literally – to be a first-class crook. That hadn't been me, but I knew plenty others who had gone and made themselves into minor idols wherever they got dispatched to.

That was probably why Sing liked me: I could stand up to the heat without trying to burn like Icarus. I wasn't a purebred cut-throat, but neither had I ever been a cut-purse. He'd weighed my relative softness and I suppose he'd judged that malleability had its own rewards.

'Did you like it?' Raphael asked, cutting into my thoughts. 'Ruining lives?'

'I don't set out to do it. I don't say no when it comes around to it, and if I were to go to hell that would be why, but I don't do it _to_ ruin other people's lives. I'm just selfish,' I admitted. 'I wanted a life of my own, financial independence and all that. I wanted to be able to make sure I could be in Peru when you woke up. That's all.'

He stayed quiet. I didn't push. Still, Raphael steered us further into the shadow of the canyon, and was conscientious enough to make sure he never went too far ahead.

Eventually, we drew up to where the canyon petered out into high river banks. We scrambled up, and I was pretty sure-footed the whole way. Twenty years of running around the world had banished any uncertainty I had about my leg. I still had my limits, but I knew that they were respectable ones.

The top of the bank afforded us relief from the glare of the river. The terrain was startlingly different, as it could be in this part of the world. There was a small lake a few hundred yards away edged in most places by tall totora reeds. The water was almost a bright turqoise running to rich blue at deeper points. Its surface was mirror-like and completely placid.

'Recognise any of this?' I asked Raphael in a hushed murmur. Something about the lake made me keep my voice down, the way you didn't shout in a church.

'No,' Raphael replied, voice equally low. 'But it might be a good place for us to stop for the day.'

He had a good point. The sun was beginning to sink below the tops of a nearby glacier, and even in the summertime the Peruvian Andes were very cold at night. We headed for the lake.

'Ground will be cold tonight,' Raphael said, pointing at the reeds. 'If we cut some of those down, they'll at least give us some insulation. You do that, and I'll scrounge up something for a fire.'

By the time I'd harvested enough reeds, putting my knife to good use, Raphael had scavenged enough acceptable firewood from around the area to make a pile of it near our rudimentary camp in the lee of some scrubby trees. It was getting dark very quickly. We started a fire and I sat as close to it as I could without becoming part of it.

'Do you think anyone's looking for us?' I ventured, shivering a little but gradually warming up.

'Maybe,' Raphael said, a little dubiously.

'You're a saint, or close enough by their estimation,' I pointed out.

'When markayuk walk off of cliffs, I don't think people go looking,' Raphael replied, clipped.

'Mightn't they want to know where you ended up, at least?'

'I think at that point, they assume you just become part of the bedrock.'

I nodded. It was dark enough now that the fire was the brightest thing in a blank, black landscape. 'I'm going to go look down the river,' I told Raphael. 'If there are lights from a village, they'll stand out now. You stay – can you see anything in this?'

'I'm not as bad as I used to be,' he said. 'I can still see you, for one. But you're right if you're thinking you can see further than I can.'

'All right, I'll be back, then.'

The river was impossible to miss because of the sound of running water, so I followed my ears and crept cautiously until I had a good vantage point. I looked around. There were no lights, not even distant ones. I went back.

'Nothing,' I announced, thumping down on our feeble reed mattress. 'At least the campfire will stand out if there's a ship looking for us from above. It should be the only bright spot for miles.' I was cold again and kept shifting uncomfortably.

Raphael, who was sitting up with his back against a tree, watched me for a while. 'Come here,' he said, jerking his chin. 'Sit with me and maybe you will _stop moving_.'

I didn't have to be asked twice. I started out by his side but he moved me until I was sitting with my back to his chest. I was stiff, but more because I did not know what to do with the physical nearness than in rejection of it. Keita and Sing were not men who liked contact. Raphael was also very definitively nothing like them, on multiple fronts.

'They warned me you shouldn't touch me with anything other than an open hand in case I end up imprisoned in your very romantic embrace,' I offered, thinking of the bones of the girl in that markayuk's arms. 'That said, they had a lot of other rules that were bollocks.'

'Shut up, Merrick.'

'If you say so.'

Raphael seemed to soak up warmth from the fire like a hearth. We watched the stars slowly wheel across the sky. This far from civilisation, the Milky Way was a thick river of stars. I remembered my pocketwatch suddenly and took it out.

'The sun normally sets near about past six,' I muttered, squinting in the dim light to read the watchface. 'Let's see if this is still working.' The time was off. If anything, the hour hand seemed to be running backwards. I shrugged and put it away.

'You will have to keep time like us backwater Indians do, now,' Raphael quipped.

'What, by having a working grasp of astronomy and staying attuned to the natural world? Impossible. Us horsey types are only good at reading things off; we can't calculate anything ourselves.'

I tilted my head back so that it was resting on Raphael's shoulders to better look at some of the brighter constellations. 'Speaking of astronomy, are you any good at it?'

He looked up as well. 'I can identify the brightest ones, those I can still see. We have different names for them that you will have, I expect, and Harry was rubbish at it so you'll have to translate for me. And we see things differently - we see the spaces between the stars. Those are the ones that are alive' Raphael pointed to the darkness between Canis Major and the Southern Cross and said, 'That's the serpent, mach'acuay .'

As he went on to another constellation and then another, I began to catch up with him. 'There's hanpatu, the toad,' I said. 'It stays away from the serpent, is that right? I think my father taught me all of this; it's coming back to me now. Do you know the names in Spanish?'

'I doubt they listened to the locals about names,' Raphael said. 'Especially about constellations that aren't there, to their eyes. I never tried to find out. Books about astronomy don't often make it to Bedlam. The old stories about the stars still get told, though.'

'Incan?'

'Yes. There are older stories than that, but no one remembers them well. You have to go back to before the Incans were conquerers themselves. Even the oldest markayuk don't recall them well.'

'What are the Incan stories?'

Raphael made a rumbling noise that echoed in his ribcage. It felt nice, like feeling a cat purr. 'The one that comes to mind now is the Inca foundation myth,' he said eventually. 'That the civilisation was founded by four brothers and four sisters who made their way from Lake Titicaca to Cuzco. They followed the Vilcamayo to get there – the Vilcamayo reflects the Milky Way.' He made a sweeping motion with one hand from east to west, following the general flow of said Milky Way across the arc of the sky.

'Follow the river,' I mused. 'Appropriate.'

'I thought so,' Raphael agreed, wry.

'Maybe this river of ours will let out at Lake Titicaca,' I said.

'Or maybe it's one of a hundred other rivers that don't,' Raphael retorted.

'Cynic,' I murmured, feeling sleepy now. It had been an exhausting day.

'And here I was thinking you were a realist,' Raphael said.

'Usually,' I agreed, fighting sleep and losing. 'Today was a good day, though.'

I didn't hear Raphael's response if he made one. I shouldn't have fallen asleep so readily, but I did. I fell asleep and dreamt of jaguars. They made sinuous circles around our camp, but in my mind they were guardians, not hunters. I slept like a child.

When I got up, I wasn't cold. The fire was dead in front of us, and I could tell Raphael was asleep from the cadence of his breathing, too deep for anything else. He had an arm loosely around my front across my collarbone. He put out very little heat, but I wasn't cold and couldn't remember if I'd been cold at all, and I knew that was strange. It was early and the watery light of false dawn made everything seem otherworldly.

'Raphael, get up,' I said, elbowing him gently. 'It's morning.'

'What?' He jerked awake, but then came back to himself. He removed his arm; I felt the loss of it. 'Sorry, yes, I'm up.'

'I'm going to the lake to take a piss,' I informed him, and went.

I stopped short midway through my walk over. The totora reeds, which had been at their tall summertime finest yesterday, were autumnal yellow and bone dry as they rustled in a light breeze.

* * *

Raphael and I sat together at the water's edge looking at the reeds and feeling grim because neither of us felt cold or hungry or tired. We should have, and that we weren't was making us unsettled and irritable.

I reached out and ran a hand over the dried tops of the reeds. I'd studied them before, and... 'Needless to say, this isn't a normal horticultural phenomenon,' I said out loud. 'Unless it _is_ normal at this elevation?' I peeked at Raphael's expression, hopeful.

Raphael looked grim. 'I doubt it.' He kept throwing glances back towards the river. 'We shouldn't stay here.'

'I agree.' I tugged on the stems. 'This might sound crazy, but I travelled across Peru some while you were having your nap. I _have_ actually gone to Lake Titicaca, and they make these reed boats there for fishing – almost more rafts than boats, I think they're called _caballitos_. We'd make better time going downriver if we used the river itself.'

'I haven't seen a _caballito_ myself, though I've heard of them,' Raphael said, looking more thoughtful and less pinched. I think he liked the idea of keeping our hands busy just as much as I did. 'They don't make them in Bedlam; totora doesn't grow there.'

I took out my knife and cut a few reeds off at their base. They were well over two metres, and these weren't the tallest ones. 'The people who lived on the lake had islands made of these reeds. They had a markayuk; I went to pay my respects and they let me stay for a while. I watched them make the boats a few times. It doesn't take very long, assembling it I mean. I'm no expert, but I remember the broad strokes.'

Harvesting and drying the reeds aside, it'd taken those fishermen less than three hours to make a raft, bunching and lashing together stems into bundles of different lengths. I had a vague recollection of how it was done, and even though I doubted that we'd be able to get the prow shaped right, a rudimentary raft – as long as it didn't sink – was better than nothing.

Raphael shrugged. 'We might as well try.' He took the knife from me and got to work cutting down the reeds; he was still incredibly strong and could move quickly. I bundled them together once he had enough of them gathered. We took a stab at making a tapering prow that would help cut the water and managed a passable, if messy, job at it. When all was said and done we tested it on the lake and modified the design until our combined weights didn't sink it. We fashioned two makeshift oars and did a lap or two getting our balance right.

By the time we were done testing our prototype the both of us were eager to leave. Something about the place was upsetting, and we had lapsed into complete silence for the last two hours of work. We dragged the _caballito_ over the hump of the bank and down to the river's edge. For a moment there it seemed mad to climb on and trust the makeshift vessel, but Raphael was having none of it.

'Get on,' he commanded, and I slid on in front. He got on behind me and pushed us off and we were away.

* * *

The river took us swiftly eastwards. We still had no idea of our relative location, but it's easier to feel like you are in control when you're in motion. We kept on the lookout for other people, but saw no one. Our pseudo- _caballito_ stayed worryingly seaworthy.

After some time, the landscape changed. It became familiar.

'It's Bedlam,' Raphael said from behind me, his voice a whisper. 'We're coming up to Bedlam.'

'Our Bedlam?' It had become mine, too, in the time he'd been away.

'I don't know. _A_ Bedlam, maybe.'

He was right. I saw the familiar high gantries. We managed to steer the boat in to land and dragged it far up and out of the way, then tied it down with some of the skinny _totora_ vine we had used to lash the it together in the first place, just in case. We got into the elevator and Raphael pulled us up. I grasped the rail, unsettled. Something was wrong. It was too quiet.

When we got to the top, the town was deserted. The both of us said hello to the mountain, but it was hastily done. Usually there were always people near the elevator, either doing work or distracting the ones doing it. No one was here. The streets were empty. Bedlam was a ghost town, and I was more than just unsettled now: I was scared.

Raphael broke the silence as we came up to the church. 'Someone's inside. They're coming out, I think.'

'I think we should hide,' I said, because sometimes you have to listen to your fears. He didn't disagree, so we took ourselves off behind a low wall where we could look over the path up to the church without being seen.

I made a noise of shock so loud when I saw who it was that Raphael looked over at me to hush me. But then they came closer and even with his bad eyesight Raphael could see who they were. What colour there was on his face drained away.

It was a blond man with a very young boy of perhaps three on his shoulders. The man looked very much like me. The boy _was_ me, or who I think I had been. It was my father, and it was me, and my father was singing to me that lullabye in Quechua about the river, how it was shaped like a dragon. We – _they_ went along happily down the road. Raphael and I couldn't hear them after that.

I turned to Raphael. He looked as sick as I felt.

'We leave now,' he said, firm. The resolution in his voice felt like the only thing I could believe in, so I did. We crept away, taking back ways because neither of us, I think, wanted to run into anyone else.

We probably broke the record for fastest descent to the river without a broken neck. By unspoken agreement, we unlashed the boat and pushed off. I only felt better when we were back in the flow of the river, heading away.

'Maybe we should have stayed,' I said, when my heart had stopped thundering in my chest. 'Looked around more.'

Raphael's voice was stony. 'Looked around the past? What do you think we were going to find?'

'Answers, maybe,' I snapped, tense.

'To what, the question of what Purgatory looks like? Or maybe Hell? That's where people like us probably end up, isn't it?'

I refused to respond to that, and he refused to apologise. We focused our efforts on not capsizing, because neither of us were navigating well. I think we were almost about to forgive one another when the river made another broad, nearly semi-circular turn and brought us back to Bedlam.

* * *

We didn't try to flee. With dread, we lashed down the boat. We went up the elevator. We hid behind the wall. We watched the church.

Nothing happened for some time. It was agony of the worst sort, waiting. After a while I couldn't keep looking, and - working on a hunch - I reached down to touch my injured leg.

'Raphael,' I said. He looked over. 'The scarring I had on my leg from my injury is gone.' I undid the whitewood band and tested my weight on the leg unsupported. I felt no pain. Everything was in perfect working order; the sort of perfect that doesn't exist in the world, where both your feet are the same size and both your legs the same length. It was the kind of perfect symmetry that doesn't exist in nature.

Raphael was staring. I looked at him, really looked. With a shaking hand, I reached over and pushed his hair out of his face. 'You've changed too,' I told him. He had. The colour was coming back to his features, and he looked glorious without the pinch of missing years. 'Maybe we can find a mirror and you can tell me what year it is.'

There was the sound of someone moving around behind the woodshed and we both spun to look over. A Raphael, a younger Raphael, a Raphael who looked exactly like the one next to me came out of the church and walked past the shed. There was a flash of gold hair in the light and he was tackled to the ground by a man taller than me who was almost certainly, I knew, my grandfather.

'I think you'll find this is unobservance of the Sabbath. How about you stop rushing around for one afternoon?' demanded Harry Tremayne.

'All right, Rabbi,' said Raphael of the 1780s, hitting him ineffectually. He looked incandescently, quietly happy.

 _My_ Raphael looked sick. I took him gently by the elbow. He wasn't looking away, and I wasn't sure if he could. He kept watching as his past self and Harry lay on the grass under a perfect spring sky. I tugged on his elbow and he tore his eyes away as if it pained him.

I wanted to say _let's go_ , but what came out was, 'Do you want to go?', a question instead of a command.

I saw his throat move as he swallowed hard. Even when he'd been crying over my grandfather's letter, he'd moved less, probably because he'd been further along. But now he was in what I could only guess was the flush of his early midlife or something even younger and he was very alive and very much in pain.

'Yes,' he said eventually. I was not sure how much it cost him to say that.

I took him away, slowly this time, to the elevator. Again, there was no one around to stop us. No one around to stop _them_ , either, I supposed, wondering in my fugue state what that meant and coming up empty.

I lowered us down. We got to the boat but didn't get on. Raphael sat down on it like a bench and put his face in one hand and shook silently. I sat down next to him and wrapped an arm around his shoulders. He was warmer than I had ever known him to be, flesh and blood like me.

'Maybe this is Heaven,' I said, blackly. Raphael looked up at me and I reached over with one ragged and stained cuff to wipe his eyes for him. 'Maybe this is Heaven,' I repeated. 'You get to stay with Harry, and I get to stay with my father. We meet all the people we loved and lost in life, like all the wishful thinkers think we do.'

'So all we have to do to live in this fairytale of yours is for each of us to kill the version of ourselves we'd replace? Merrick, that's bloody stupid even by the standards of stories meant for children.' Raphael rubbed his eyes then pulled his hand away. He looked raw; I remembered again how all the centuries of his life had happened just in the last few years.

'Fairytales are grim,' I said. 'This is grim.'

'Even if this weren't grim,' Raphael said, ignoring my stupid pun and staring me down with red-rimmed eyes. 'Even if this ended in happily ever fucking after, I wouldn't stay. Jesus, Merrick.'

'Wouldn't you?' I asked, surprised.

'Harry is dead,' Raphael said flatly. 'You're not. Your father is dead. You're not.'

'Aren't I? Aren't you?'

'Maybe we are,' Raphael said, hotly, 'or maybe we're only lost.'

'Lost?'

'Forward is the past,' Raphael said. 'Our ancestors are in front of us, they started downstream before us. Stand still and the future will catch up with you. I used to think that was just a metaphor.' He looked at the river, then back at me. 'But there are things the monks don't tell you until you change, and I haven't exactly had time to sit down and have coffee with them yet.'

'Some _markayuk_ walk off of cliffs,' I said, still uncertain but beginning to see the outline of the thing. 'Maybe they were trying to come here, wherever this is, trying to go back.'

'There isn't a point in going back,' Raphael said. He cracked a broken smile at me, but there was real humour underneath it. 'There is an underrated place called the present, and that's where I would like to be.'

I looked away. I couldn't smile at someone that hard and still look at them in the eye. 'The boat,' I said when I had some control over myself. 'Let's get rid of it.'

We unlashed it and dragged it to the river and set it out to float free on the current. We waited a long time – but what was time outside of time, really – but it didn't come back on a loop.

We sat together on a bench near the elevator just watching the river roll for the longest time. At some point I stretched out my now-good leg and Raphael did the same, and we crossed our ankles together and left them there. I had no idea where or when we were, but it was the happiest I had felt, I think, in my life.

'How long do we have to wait before the future catches us up, do you think?' I asked him. Now that we weren't quite under as much duress, it occurred to me that the other side of the river didn't look the way it ought to: it wasn't Bedlam, either my Bedlam or his Bedlam or our Bedlam or the Bedlams or before. Maybe if we went back up that Bedlam would be gone, too, but I wasn't inclined to find out.

'Could be never or it could be right this instant, I suppose,' Raphael said philosophically. 'Does it matter? I don't even know why we fell. Someone in the monastery has answers that they owe us.' He sounded sure of himself, which I hadn't heard much before. 'Maybe this is their idea of a good prank to play on the Christianised, a reminder of what the world can _really_ be like. They never said.'

'Maybe that's why _markayuk_ are meant to cross over earlier rather than later.'

'Mm.'

I thought about what Raphael was suggesting and followed the logic. 'If we cross over and head to the monastery, they might be able to tell us what's going on. Or, at least not think we're crazy.'

'Probably,' Raphael agreed.

'You don't sound inclined to be bothered.'

'The monastery isn't going anywhere,' he shrugged. 'I know it was a long time ago for you, but just yesterday I remember you and I getting through by the skin of our teeth. I'm not in any rush now.'

He was looking at his hands, which look like any other man's now.

 _You want to take your time,_ I thought to myself. _Because now you have some of it, not just rations meted out at random._

I looked away from him and pointed across the river at the other side. It was uninhabited, since no one from Bedlam could be bothered to build over there. 'That looks like a good spot to build ourselves something to wait it out in. One of us will have to invent indoor plumbing if we're to keep happy, and I suspect it shan't be me.'

'What's the use of indoor plumbing if we don't get hungry, don't eat, and don't drink, Merrick?' Raphael sounded bemused.

'Good point,' I conceded. 'Well, I've got a long list of other things that I never found the time to do. Proper slow horticulture work, for one.'

Raphael rolled his eyes at me, but he was smiling. 'If that is the sort of miniature eternity I get to look forward to, I'll pass, thank you.'

'You could teach me how to write and read _khipu_ properly,' I said. 'That will come in useful when we get back again.'

Raphael was quiet for a while, then he put an arm over my shoulders and proclaimed, 'A passable idea.'

'" _Passable_ ", he says.'

'I expect a lot from my students,' Raphael said, feigning haughtiness.

'You gave up on your last student and proceeded to learn an entire new language to talk with instead,' I teased. 'I don't think you have the patience to be a good teacher.'

'I have a lot of time to learn,' he shrugged.

'So do I, as it turns out.'

'You'd best get started on that hut, then,' Raphael said after we'd been still for a very long time just basking in each other's company.

' _I'd_ best get started?'

'You're probably stronger than I am, being some sort of unborn proto-spirit,' he said. 'I hope I don't have to watch you grow up, if it comes to it.'

I snorted and leaned my head on his shoulder. He touched his temple to the crown of my head. 'I'll start in a minute,' I declared.

We sat there and watched the sun set on an epoch, and saw the sun rise an aeon later.


End file.
